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From: roelw@cs.vu.nl
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Chinese room argument
Message-ID: <2185@star.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 20 Mar 89 17:14:29 GMT
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Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam
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In <4494@pt.cs.cmu.edu>, kck@g.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Karl Kluge) answers a previous
posting of mine, 

>> The general result is that a symbol-manipulating device is not affected by
>> the denotation you or anyone else give to the symbols it manipulates.
>
>If you are talking about the process by which strings of output symbols get
>produced, this is true but irrelevant. The process by which *you* generate
>the strings of symbols that form your posts (regardless of whether your mind
>is describable by a formal system) is not affected by the denotation I or
>anyone else give to the symbols you produce. That is not a demonstration
>that you do not "know" the denotations of those words, yet you want us to
>believe that it is a demonstration that a UTM does not (and cannot) "know"
>the denotations of its symbols.

I think that the fact that symbol-manipulation processes manipulate symbols on
the basis of their syntactic structure only is extremely relevant, once you
stop assuming what is to be argued, viz. that people think by manipulating
symbols. The fact that my thought process is not affected by the denotation
which other people assign to the symbols in which I express my thought is not
(by me at least) intended to show that I know the denotation of these symbols.
I am not trying to show, or prove, that people can think.
The issue is not whether people think, but whether symbol-manipulating
porocesses can think. The Chinese room argument tries to make plausible that
they cannot.

>> What this shows, I think, is that the denotation of public symbols is
>> publicly known and that if you make a private change in what is
>> conventionally denoted by a symbol, you will get social problems.
>> Conventions about what the denotations of symbols are, are not (merely) in
>> the head of one individual but are social institutions. 
>
>First, let's acknowledge the distinction (popping up explicitly for the
>first time) between the "public" symbols produced by a system (the words
>sent along the teletype to the subject in the Turing Test, for instance),
>and it's "private" symbols (gensyms produced by LISP, for instance). 

The distinction I make is between the public and private denotation of a public
symbol, i.e. the symbol (e.g. word) which I use to express my thought. I am 
not assuming that I have private symbols "in" which I think. However, for
symbol-manipulating system like a computer, I agree with the following:

>There are no social conventions, and
>hence no privileged denotations for the system's "private" symbols.

Here there is a confusion again:

> As far as
>I can tell, the only indication that I "know" the denotations of the words I
>use is
>
>1) I have some goal in mind (I'd like a bowl of ice cream)
>2) I emit a string of symbols ("John, would you get me a bowl of ice cream
>   while you're getting yourself one?"), and
>3) Things in the environment react in such a way that my goal in emitting the
>   string of symbols I did is satisfied (my apartmentmate brings me a bowl of
>   ice cream).
>
>Since this happens fairly consistently, I assume that the denotations I have
>for the words I use roughly overlaps the denotations of those words in the
>minds of those I talk to, but that's the most I can conclude. 

What you confuse is knowing a denotation of a symbol and agreeing with other
people about what the denotation of the symbol is (during the discourse).

After showing that symbols can be realized physically, and that their
operational semantics can be realized physically in a causal process, you
remark that 

>The denotations of the symbols have no corresponding reality.

Correct, but I don't see what that has to do with the problem of whether a
symbol-manipulation process can think. Unless, of course, you assume that our
brains realize thinking by realizing a symbol-manipulating process.

Roel Wieringa